People generally establish organizations in order to achieve a desired objective. Organizations are sometimes flat, sometimes hierarchical, and sometimes complex. Governments, charities, and businesses are typical examples of entities that have organizations. Apart from a stated objective of an organization, a more fundamental purpose of an organization is to achieve the stated objective in an orderly and efficient manner. However, as organizations grow, order and efficiency are sometimes sacrificed.
Large organizations, namely, those with many groups of people, often have well-established procedures covering all phases of achieving the objective of the organization. An example objective is engineering a product. The need for procedures is driven by the need to ensure that the objective is achieved. However, larger scale objectives typically require larger numbers of people which results in more complex organizations. Compare the scale of an organization assembled to engineer a stapler with the scale of an organization assembled to engineer a jumbo jetliner.
A problem with large organizations is that they sometimes become so large and complex that they are difficult to understand. For personnel that have not experienced all facets of an organization, understanding the organization can be even more difficult. In another area, various organizations are audited, not only from a financial perspective, but from a procedure perspective. For example, the government audits various government contractors to ensure compliance with various contract requirements, and various standards inspectors audit for compliance with particular standards, such as ISO 9000 requirements. For large organizations it may be difficult to easily identify who is responsible for compliance with a certain aspect of an audit.
A problem with large and sometimes small organizations is the difficulty to be able to quickly understand how the organization operates as a whole and the interrelationship between the groups and the established procedures within the organization. Often, there are many people organized in various groups. Each group is likely to have multiple work objectives, each person within the group is likely to have multiple responsibilities, and the group is likely to be dependent upon information and/or work products from other group in order to meets its commitments. Complicating matters is the fact that there are typically many groups which compounds the difficulty of identifying problems and affecting meaningful change in the organization. Therefore, a system and method that addresses the above identified problems is needed.